Interview with Karl Marx, head of L'Internationale

London, July 3 -- You have asked me to find out something about the
International Association, and I have tried to do so. The enterprise
is a difficult one just now. London is indisputably the headquarters
of the Association, but the English people have got a scare, and smell
International in everything as King James smelled gunpowder after the
famous plot. The consciousness of the Society has naturally increased
with the suspiciousness of the public; and if those who guide it have
a secret to keep, they are of the stamp of men who keep a secret
well. I have called on two of their leading members, have talked with
one freely, and I here give you the substance of my conversation. I
have satisfied myself of one thing, that it is a society of genuine
workingmen, but that these workmen are directed by social and
political theories of another class. One man whom I saw, a leading
member of the Council, was sitting at his workman's bench during our
interview, and left off talking to me from time to time to receive a
complaint, delivered in no courteous tone, from one of the many little
masters in the neighborhood who employed him. I have heard this same
man make eloquent speeches in public inspired in every passage with
the energy of hate toward the classes that call themselves his
rulers. I understood the speeches after this glimpse at the domestic
life of the orator. He must have felt that he had brains enough to
have organized a working government, and yet here he was obliged to
devote his life to the most revolting taskwork of a mechanical
profession. He was proud and sensitive, and yet at every turn he had
to return a bow for a grunt and a smile for a command that stood on
about the same level in the scale of civility with a huntsman's call
to his dog. This man helped me to a glimpse of one side of the nature
of the International, the result of
Labor Against Capital of the workman who produces against the
middleman who enjoys. Here was the hand that would smite hard when the
time came, and as to the head that plans, I think I saw that too, in
my interview with Dr. Karl Marx.

Dr. Karl Marx is a German doctor of philosophy, with a German breadth
of knowledge derived both from observation of the living world and
from books. I should conclude that he has never been a worker in the
ordinary sense of the term. His surroundings and appearance are those
of a well-to-do man of the middle class. The drawing room into which I
was ushered on the night of the interview would have formed very
comfortable quarters for a thriving stockbroker who had made his
competence and was now beginning to make his fortune. It was comfort
personified, the apartment of a man of taste of easy means, but with
nothing in it peculiarly characteristic of its owner. A fine album of
Rhine views on the table, however, gave a clue to his nationality. I
peered cautiously into the vase on the sidetable for a bomb. I sniffed
for petroleum, but the smell was the smell of roses. I crept back
stealthily to my seat, and moodily awaited the worst.

He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face to
face. Yes, I am tete-a-tete with the revolution incarnate, with the
real founder and guiding spirit of the International Society, with the
author of the address in which capital was told that is it warred on
labor, it must expect to have its house burned down about its ears --
in a word, with the
Apologist for the Commune of Paris. Do you remember the bust of
Socrates? The man who died rather than profess his belief in the Gods
of the time -- the man with the fine sweep of profile for the forehead
running meanly at the end into a little snub, curled-up feature, like
a bisected pothook, that formed the nose. Take this bust in your
mind's eye, color the beard black, dashing it here and there with
puffs of gray; clap the head thus made on a portly body of the middle
height, and the Doctor is before you. Throw a veil over the upper part
of the face, and you might be in the company of a born
vestryman. Reveal the essential feature, the immense brown, and you
know at once that you have to deal with that most formidable of all
composite individual forces -- a dreamer who thinks, a thinker who
dreams.

I went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the
dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say
clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered
further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had
made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman's smile on
one of its faces, and on the other, a murderous conspirator's
scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which theory dwelt?

The professor laughed, chuckled a little I fancied, at the thought
that we were so frightened of him. "There is no mystery to clear
up, dear sir," he began, in a very polished form of the Hans
Breitmann dialect, "except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity
in those who perpetually ignore the fact that out Association is a
public one, and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are
published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a
penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as
much about us as we know ourselves.

R. [Landor]: Almost -- yes, perhaps so; but will not the something I
shall not know constitute the all-important reservation? To be quite
frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer,
this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something more
than the ignorant ill will of the multitude. And it is still pertinent
to ask, even after what you have told me, what is the International
Society?

Dr. M.: You have only to look at the individuals of which it is
composed -- workmen.

R.: Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft that
sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can believe
that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are
made. Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at
all. But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a
bold, and, I hope you will forgive me for adding, not overscrupulous
conclave?

Dr. M.: There is nothing to prove.

R.: The last Paris insurrection?

Dr. M.: I demand firstly the proof that there was any plot at all --
that anything happened that was not the legitimate effect of the
circumstances of the moment; or the plot granted, I demand the proofs
of the participation in it of the International Association.

R.: The presence of the communal body of so many members of the
Association.

Dr. M.: Then it was a plot of the Freemasons, too, for their share in
the work as individuals was by no means a slight one. I should not be
surprised, indeed, to find the Pope setting down the whole
insurrection to their account. But try another explanation. The
insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of
the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administration,
but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the
International Association. Yet, the Association, as such, may be in no
way responsible for their action.

R.: It will seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret
instruction from London, and even grants of money. Can it be affirmed
that the alleged openness of the Association's proceedings precludes
all secrecy of communication?

Dr. M.: What association ever formed carried on its work without
private as well as public agencies? But to talk of secret instruction
from London, as of decrees in the matter of faith and morals from some
centre of papal domination and intrigue, is wholly to misconceive the
nature of the International. This would imply a centralized form of
government for the International, whereas the real form is designedly
that which gives the greatest play to local energy and
independence. In fact, the International is not properly a government
for the working class at all. It is a bond of union rather than a
controlling force.

R.: And of union to what end?

Dr. M.: The economical emancipation of the working class by the
conquest of political power. The use of that political power to the
attainment of social ends. It is necessary that our aims should be
thus comprehensive to include every form of working-class activity. To
have made them of a special character would have been to adapt them to
the needs of one section -- one nation of workmen alone. But how could
all men be asked to unite to further the objects of a few? To have
done that, the Association must have forfeited its title to
International. The Association does not dictate the form of political
movements; it only requires a pledge as to their end. It is a network
of affiliated societies spreading all over the world of labor. In each
part of the world, some special aspect of the problem presents itself,
and the workmen there address themselves to its consideration in their
own way. Combinations among workmen cannot be absolutely identical in
detail in Newcastle and in Barcelona, in London and in Berlin. In
England, for instance, the way to show political power lies open to
the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful
agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work. In France, a
hundred laws of repression and a mortal antagonism between classes
seem to necessitate the violent solution of social war. The choices of
that solution is the affair of the working classes of that
country. The International does not presume to dictate in the matter
and hardly to advise. But to every movement it accords its sympathy
and its aid within the limits assigned by its own laws.

R.: And what is the nature of that aid?

Dr. M.: To give an example, one of the commonest forms of the movement
for emancipation is that of strikes. Formerly, when a strike took
place in one country, it was defeated by the importation of workmen
from another. The International has nearly stopped all that. It
receives information of the intended strike, it spreads that
information among its members, who at once see that for them the seat
of the struggle must be forbidden ground. The masters are thus left
alone to reckon with their men. In most cases, the men require no
other aid than that. Their own subscriptions, or those of the
societies to which they are more immediately affiliated, supply them
with funds, but should the pressure upon them become too heavy, and
the strike be one of which the Association approves, their necessities
are supplied out of the common purse. By these means, a strike of the
cigar makers of Barcelona was brought to a victorious issue the other
day. But the Society has not interest in strikes, though it supports
them under certain conditions. It cannot possibly gain by them in a
pecuniary point of view, but it may easily lose. Let us sum it all up
in a word. The working classes remain poor amid the increase of
wealth, wretched amid the increase of luxury. Their material privation
dwarfs their moral as well as their physical stature. They cannot rely
on others for a remedy. It has become then with them an imperative
necessity to take their own case in hand. They must revive the
relations between themselves and the capitalists and landlords, and
that means they must transform society. This is the general end of
every known workmen's organization; land and labor leagues, trade and
friendly societies, co-operative production are but means toward
it. To establish a perfect solidarity between these organizations is
the business of the International Association. Its influence is
beginning to be felt everywhere. Two papers spread its views in Spain,
three in Germany, the same number in Austria and in Holland, six in
Belgium, and six in Switzerland. And now that I have told you what the
International is, you may, perhaps, be in a position to form your own
opinion as to its pretended plots.

R.: And Mazzini, is he a member of your body?

Dr. M.: (laughing) Ah, no. We should have made but little progress if
we had not got beyond the range of his ideas.

R.: You surprise me. I should certainly have thought that he
represented most advanced views.

Dr. M.: He represents nothing better than the old idea of a
middle-class republic. We want no part of the middle class. He has
fallen as far to the rear of the modern movement as the German
professors, who, nevertheless, are still considered in Europe as the
apostles of the cultured democratism of the future. They were so, at
one time -- before '48, perhaps, when the German middle class, in the
English sense, had scarcely attained its proper development. But now
they have gone over bodily to the reaction, and the proletariat knows
them no more.

R.: Some people have thought they saw signs of a positivist element in
your organization.

Dr. M.: No such thing. We have positivists among us, and others not of
our body who work as well. But this is not by virtue of their
philosophy, which will have nothing to do with popular government, as
we understand it, and which seeks only to put a new hierarchy in place
of the old one.

R.: It seems to me, then, that the leaders of the new international
movement have had to form a philosophy as well as an association
themselves.

Dr. M.: Precisely. It is hardly likely, for instance, that we could
hope to prosper in our war against capital if we derive our tactics,
say, from the political economy of Mill. He has traced one kind of
relationship between labor and capital. We hope to show that it is
possible to establish another.

R.: And the United States?

Dr. M.: The chief concerns of our activity are for the present among
the old societies of Europe. Many circumstances have hitherto tended
to prevent the labor problem from assuming an all-absorbing importance
in the United States. But they are rapidly disappearing, and it is
rapidly coming to the front there with the growth, as in Europe, of a
laboring class distinct from the rest of the community and divorced
from capital.

R.: It would seem that in this country the hoped-for solution,
whatever it may be, will be attained without the violent means of
revolution. The English system of agitating by platform and press,
until minorities become converted into majorities, is a hopeful sign.

Dr. M.: I am not so sanguine on that point as you. The English middle
class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of
the majority, so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting
power. But, mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it
considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slaveowners's war.

I have given you, as well as I can remember them, the heads of my
conversation with this remarkable man. I shall leave you to form your
own conclusions. Whatever may be said for or against the probability
of its complicity with the movement of the Commune, we may be assured
that in the International Association, the civilized world has a new
power in its midst, with which it must soon come to a reckoning for
good or ill.